2011

Facebook to Place Sponsored Stories Ads into Users' Newsfeeds

A big change was announced for Facebook advertisers today: starting in January, Facebook will be featuring “Sponsored Story” ads in users’ news feeds. Until now, all advertising on Facebook was limited to display only within the right panel of the interface. This change will greatly increase the marketing presence of brands advertising Facebook, expanding the exposure of these “organic interactions” ad units (as Facebook refers to Sponsored Stories).

In case you’re not aware, Sponsored Stories are a Facebook advertising format—Facebook defines them as stories that are “eligible to appear in your News Feed.” Sponsored Stories show up, like traditional ads, on the right column of pages on Facebook. Companies can choose different user actions — such as posts, likes, check-ins or actions within Facebook apps — and feature them in their ad campaign. Facebook says that unlike traditional ads, “Sponsored Stories help to drive authentic and scalable word of mouth,” because the ads stem from real user interactions and are shown to all of that user’s friends. Here are some examples of Sponsored Stories you’ve probably already seen in your Facebook account:

“App Share” Stories are created when a user starts using a Facebook app

“Page Post Like” Stories are created when a user “Likes” one of the posts made by your page

Sponsored stories in the news feed will be the same size as other items that feature on it and will be displayed with a link that reads "Sponsored" underneath the post. Users who mouse over the link will see the text: "This was already shared with you. A sponsor paid to feature it here."

This is great news for marketers, and for Wildfire. Earlier this year, we announced the Wildfire Storyteller application, a utility available to all Wildfire Social Marketing Suite clients which allows page administrators to create a place on the page for branded interactions that easily create and encourage feed stories. Using the Wildfire Storyteller app, you can create a tab in your Facebook Page to ask your users fun and engaging questions about your brand. You can then set up an entire customized Facebook Feed Story that gets published alongside that user’s generated response. This feed story is especially powerful in that you can included a branded video or image with the story and you can also customize the feed story title, URL and description. So, for example, a movie brand could use our Storyteller app to ask fans “What was your favorite scene from the Hangover II movie trailer?” and the ad generated from a user’s response could include the movie trailer, a link to buy tickets for the movie, and a description of the movie. As long as you’ve created a Sponsored Stories ad campaign, all of these newsfeed posts create ads targeted to your users’ friends.

Since 27% of all users’ time on Facebook is spent looking through the newsfeed, Wildfire is excited about this new opportunity for marketers to further leverage the viral power of Sponsored Stories.

What do you think of the news that Sponsored Stories will be displayed in user news feeds? Tell us in the comments, we’re excited to hear your opinions!

HOW TO: Strengthen Your Twitter Brand Strategy in time for the New Twitter Pages

On December 8th, Twitter announced a new version of the network that was designed to make it easier for users to “discover what’s happening now”. You’ve probably already read about the introduction of special pages for brands. The new features are exciting, and promise heightened engagement between brands and their followers. The new design is about growth and keeping users on the site longer, encouraging more interaction, and making Twitter more accessible to the masses who may start as consumers of tweets rather than big tweeters themselves.Twitter’s new enhanced profile pages for brands won’t be widely available right away. At this time, there are a handful of major advertising brand partners who are piloting the pages during the launch period. Here’s what you can do in the meantime to continue developing your follower audience on Twitter:1. Drive branded conversations with the new Twitter buttons.
Sprinkle the new Tweet buttons throughout appropriate places on your corporate website, such as on product pages or in the customer support forums, which allow people to press “Tweet @ourbrand” and leave a comment mentioning your brand name, creating network conversations tied to branded content.

2. Use embeddable tweets within the content planned for your editorial calendar.

When planning items for your editorial calendar, like product updates or blog posts, consider including embedded tweets in the articles you publish, allowing readers to interact not just with the blog while they’re reading it, but with your brand on Twitter, all from one place.

3. Run a promotion, like a sweepstakes, on Twitter to drive activity around your brand.
Running a promotion where users interact with your brand on Twitter to win a cool prize is one way to spur conversations, mentions, tweets, and re-tweets. Maximizing the reach of your Twitter content is key in growing a strong follower base, one that will be especially engaged in time for the roll-out of the new Twitter pages format for all brands.

Here at Wildfire we’re incredibly excited about the changes Twitter is making across their site (and many of these changes will affect Twitter mobile users as well). Twitter users may prove to be especially valuable to brands because of the unique dynamics of the Twitter community. The accounts a typical Twitter user follows don’t always represent their real-world social connections, but rather their brand affinities, aspirational interests, and also their favorite celebrities! This means that your opportunity to build a community around your brand, both with the new tools available now as well as the forthcoming brand pages, may be one of the most valuable social marketing investments that you can make in 2012!

Which of the new Twitter features are you planning on implementing for your brand? Share with us in the comments; we’re curious to hear what you think!

3 Ways to Boost Interaction With Your Facebook Fans

Are you looking for fresh ideas to engage your Facebook fans?

Do you have a pretty nice fan base, but you’re struggling to come up with ideas to engage them on a daily basis?

One proven approach is to help your fans.

Here are 3 techniques used by some of the most successful Facebook pages. Try them on your page to see how your fans respond!

This post was originally published for the Social Media Examiner blog.

#1: Become a resource

Despite the level of connection you think you have with your fans on Facebook, many still express pleasant surprise when you respond to them personally on the social network.

Use fan names when you can, and respond one-on-one to the comments they make. This proves to fans you are listening and are receptive to their commentary and feedback, making it more likely that they will post in the future.

Moreover, invite conversation by asking your fans’ opinions on topics, or asking them to tell you what sorts of content they’d appreciate.

Everybody likes being asked, and fans feel extra-appreciated when you fulfill these desires—so don’t ask them for input you never intend to use or incorporate.

In the example below, Time Warner Cable demonstrates an inconsistent response strategy toward different users. While “Sharon” got her request attended to by the page administrator, “Regina” reports frustration that her posts are being removed instead of replied to, indicating that she had posted additional comments earlier than the final post visible in the thread.

If your brand strategy is to be a resource to all fans, it is important that you treat all fan comments in the same way by responding to all of them, no matter the sentiment.

One example of this kind of open interaction strategy working very successfully is our own continued initiative to build out a Facebook fan page community of marketers, business owners and social media managers interested in sharing knowledge about social media (as well as Wildfire!).

We have found over time that our most engaging posts, which get the most feedback from our users, are consistently the ones where we invite people to post any question they have about social media or invite them to have their pages reviewed by social media professionals.

The key is to follow up (even for just an hour) with all of the questions and actually answer them. Because the promise to answer any question is not an empty promise, the users become confident that their questions can be answered and trust the brand for it.

An excellent example of a smaller business getting engagement right with great messaging strategies comes from the Pennsylvania Macaroni Company, an imported foods store in Pittsburgh.

As of this writing, the store had just under 1,100 fans. Their social media manager told me they regularly get over 1% engagement on their posts, a great figure for their size.

#2: Offer your services, free

What is your brand known for? What would you like it to be known for? If you provide a product or a particular service like consulting or advisement, consider offering your fans a taste of it every once in a while for free!

According to eMarketer, the #1 reason users become fans of a brand on Facebook is to gain access to exclusive content, events or sales. Your brand can capitalize on this desire while leveraging the brand’s capabilities by giving users an occasional exclusive pass to experience the business, free.

Here are several examples of companies doing this on Facebook, to the delight of their users:

Rue La La, an online boutique of designer merchandise and clothing, knows many of its fans are in tune with fashion trends and enjoy thinking about design, clothing and style. As such, one of their most popular fan page “events” is a weekly invitation for fans to join a stylist on the page for an hour of live interaction.

Because typically most people don’t have access to a personal stylist or advice from one, Rue La La creates an environment where fans can happily expect this recurring event.

We use this technique at Wildfire as well.

Every week, these invitations to post are the most consistently popular updates! Even the users who don’t get their pages reviewed that week leave feedback that they enjoy watching the advice for other fan pages, and that the learning experience is valuable.

#3: Make your fan page a complete knowledge hub

When brainstorming how to entice users to join and interact with your brand, the challenge is to come up with ways to encourage them to interact with the page continuously over time and prevent disengagement.

For brands that have a rich background or require a fair amount of user education, creating a fan page containing valuable resources and information that benefit the user is essential. The goal is to capture users with an initial promotion, and to keep them returning to your page for information even after the promotion is over.

An example of a page that achieved this goal is Webroot, a software company that distributes security applications and programs.

The initial user pull is the promotion Webroot has set up on its landing page. Users visit the Facebook page for a chance to win high-value prizes such as airline tickets, electronics and kitchen appliances.

Recognizing that its promotion would drive considerable traffic to its page, Webroot created a powerful, resource-rich page about its products and services, including a tab with educational slide decks, a full customer support portal (“Ask Webroot”), an explanatory splash page about their mobile security products, and even a collection of YouTube videos about the software.

As a result, users who visited Webroot’s page to participate in the promotion were also exposed to the page’s valuable content, which gave them a reason to return. In turn, Webroot created a full-service, user-friendly community through its Facebook page, a place where fans go to access information about the company.

Now that you’ve seen several examples of companies helping their fans help themselves, what’s the first approach you are planning to take with your fan page? Putting together a library of resources? Testing the waters by giving away some free services? I’d love to hear from you! Leave your questions and comments in the box below.

Top 3 Must-Have Qualities of a Good Signup Form

The significance of online forms can’t be understated; effective forms are a way for users to communicate with brands, and a way for brands to acquire customers, grow communities, accumulate data and drive sales. To ensure that the forms you’re creating are effective, be sure that they align with these three best practices:

Use big, bold typefaces. Keep in mind that you have roughly 8-10 seconds to get a conversion, so it’s important to capture users’ attention immediately with your logo and branded message in bold type that is tough to miss.

Make sure your forms have a clear purpose. Users are much more inclined to complete your form when they know what they’re getting in return, and when they’re getting it. To achieve this, make sure that the forms you create answer five key questions for the user:

What is this?

Why should I sign up? (i.e., What is the end result?)

Who else is using this?

How do I sign up?

When will I receive the emails, prize, or other follow-up in return?

By answering these questions, you help set realistic user expectations, which promotes the development of an honest relationship your audience and your brand. An honest relationship is key to nurturing brand loyalty and encouraging your audience to speak positively of your brand to others.

Incorporate calls to action on your buttons. Buttons are included on online forms to compel a user to do something. By incorporating custom calls to action into your buttons, such as “Sign-Up for Our Newsletter,” “Get Product Updates,” and “Download Our Free E-Book,” they become inherently more enticing to users than a simple “Submit” button. Keep this in mind when you design forms, and give users a reason to click!

What are your plans for using Wildfire’s signup form plugin? Weigh in with your own creative ideas in the comments below. We love hearing from you!

17 Creative Ways to Get Users to Sign Up

We’ve all seen signup forms used for email lists, but why stop there? Our new Signup Form Plugin is so flexible, we had a hard time even naming it! It’s much more than a traditional signup form app, and the possibilities for use are endless. Below are just a few of the creative ways to use the tool, from essay contests to surveys to virtual scavenger hunts.

Lead Capture

Make a beautiful, creative newsletter signup form and publish it to Facebook, your website and your mobile site.

Make a special deal, gift, coupon code, video, whitepaper, ebook or other valuable piece of content available only to users who submit the form.

Create flash sales, where a special deal is revealed only after a certain number of people have completed the signup form. This encourages social sharing and lets you promote products or services, all while capturing leads.

Remember all those bottle-top promotions? Integrate online and offline promotions by printing coupon or other codes on your products, and allowing users to enter those, along with their contact information, in your online form.

Integrate your website and Facebook page with LinkedIn’s network, by putting up a page for users to sign-in with their LinkedIn accounts and drop “virtual business cards” into a fishbowl for prize entry.

Engagement

Create a virtual treasure hunt, where fans get clues and answer questions through your form. Keep your fans coming back day after day and give a prize to winners at the end.

Incorporate SMS messaging! Let users sign up for an SMS message, voicemail or phone call with a premium deal or unique content to be sent directly to their phones, integrating with a service such as Twilio.

Run a contest with user-generated content. Let users submit testimonials, essays or product reviews, or even run a caption contest, and pick the winner at the end!

Create a fun Mad Libs-style form, letting users fill in blanks to create unique stories about your brand or promotion.

Run a true scavenger hunt by publishing your form to your mobile site and letting users gather clues at physical locations, input them and submit the completed form to win!

Provide targeted deals to certain geographic, age or other groups. With advanced code verification functionality, you can require that users submit a certain code that you have predefined--such as a zip code or birthdate--in order to proceed. You can vary the deal according to the answer that users provide.

Surveys and Support

Use it to survey and poll your users. Find out their favorite products, interests and more, and include Name and Email fields to build your leads.

Provide a forum for product feedback, and incorporate a Storyteller plugin to encourage conversation and social sharing about your products.

Use it to gather support tickets. Include dropdown and text fields in your form, and integrate it with your company’s support site provider, such as Zendesk.

User Registration

Tie the signup form into your own account registration, so that when users fill out the signup form on Facebook, they are also automatically signed up for an account with your company. This works well for member-only shopping sites.

Are you targeting businesses? Allow professionals to sign up for webinars, conferences and other events directly from your page, and even integrate with services like GoToWebinar or Eventbrite.

Let users register for events, and give registrants exclusive content access, such as event-specific deals or information.

To chat with one of our social media experts about using forms to maximize your marketing, click here!

4 Ways to Drive Holiday Sales through Social Media

Here’s a trend that should give you a bit of holiday cheer: the average holiday shopper plans to do 36% of their shopping—up from 32.7% last year— online this year. If you get your holiday themed social marketing campaigns right, you could see that sales increase hit your bottom line. Try these 5 holiday marketing strategies to give your season’s sales a boost:

1. Dedicate page real estate to the holidays and your products.

Create a seasonal activity hub on your Facebook page for visitors and fans. Whether you make a new tab with rotating seasonal content (like our Wildfire Page Manager Paypal Storefront template featuring adorable dinosaur sweaters by the Sisters Oberth), or you create an entire mini-website within a tab (like Denizen America), showcase special holiday products that make your fans feel festive.

Combine continuously updating products, special offers, messages, or the ability to shop for seasonal products (see below), and you’ll give your fans the message that your page is a fun place to hang out, and buy, this season!

2. Build buzz with a well-timed reveal of sales or special products.

Black Friday (the day after Thanksgiving) is the biggest shopping day of the year. In fact, ShopperTrak reported that $10.69 billion was spent on Black Friday 2010, with 212 million shoppers visiting their favorite retailers offline and online! Additionally, Cyber Monday 2010 saw $1.028 billion of online sales from 9 million shoppers.

Consumers are primed to expect sales and juicy discounts as merchants try to drive them into a pre-Christmas buying frenzy. Take advantage of this expectation by creating a specially themed Black Friday or Cyber Monday coupon, product offering, group deal or sale, that reveals in connection with the holidays or when your page reaches a certain fan threshold.

In the example below, a Wildfire Social Marketing Suite Page Manager template is configured to do a Black Friday Countdown. It can be customized to any brand’s design or formatting guidelines.

3. Run a holiday-themed promotion that incorporates your product.

Based on numerous research reports, it’s clear that Facebook fans get especially excited about fun, holiday-themed promotions. In fact, In 2010, 21% of Cyber Monday shoppers heard about a promotion through someone in their online social network. Also, Media Post states that, in 2010, social media and mobile capabilities were the key drivers of Black Friday sales with consumers using mobile devices for product reviews, promotions, price checks and to check-in while shopping at various stores.

The holiday season is the time to put your product front-and-center with a promotion. When crafting your promotion, consider including your product in the entry process (such as asking the user to take a picture of himself with a branded item), or as part of the prize. For example, both Silk and Luster Premium Whitening included a supply of their product as part of the ultimate prize, aligning the interest of the entrants with these products specifically.

4. Reinforce your product’s holiday uses through specific and targeted messaging.

When messaging your audience, see if you can address a holiday theme as well as advertise your product in the same message. When you fit these two pieces together, your messages ride the existing wave of holiday cheer and get extra attention. In the examples below, HP consistently posts updates to Facebook fans that feature HP products, but with an appealing holiday slant (an incentive to “like” the post for a special deal). One way to automate the messaging process in advance of the holiday season is to plan out a posting schedule, like for an editorial calendar, and schedule your messages to go live using a page posting tool like Wildfire Messenger. This way, once you plan the messages, you can sit back and watch them publish themselves!

Now you have four strategies you can use this holiday season to promote your products: dedicating page real estate to the holidays, running holiday promotions, timing special sales events, and targeting holiday-themed messaging. Want more holiday-themed strategies, tips, success stories, and advice? Join us for our November 15th webinar, “Perfecting your Holiday Social Media Strategy!” Register here for the recording.

Do you have additional ideas about how to promote your brand during the holiday season? Share them with us in the comments below, so we can learn from you, too!

10 Tips for a Sharp Facebook Messaging Strategy for the Holidays

Recent studies about the amount of time users spend reading the Facebook newsfeed, the subsequent redesign of the front page of Facebook, and the findings that branded fan pages — and the updates that users see on them — are vastly more successful than other forms of Facebook advertising, make one thing clear:

Engagement is king.

In fact, there’s no better time to engage with fans than the holiday season. If you’re behind on planning your holiday social strategy (Thanksgiving is less than two weeks away!), we’ve got you covered with ten proven, holiday-themed social messaging ideas that will ignite holiday cheer.

(If you want to see these great holiday marketing strategies in action, join us for a webinar on Tuesday, November 15. Click here to watch the recording.)

1. Create a branded calendar with an engagement initiative that spans a series of days. Reveal something appealing each day. Then message your fans about each reveal.

12 Days of Christmas? 8 Days of Hannukah? 31 Days of Social Media? Have you ever seen an advent calendar, where windows open daily thru Christmas, each revealing a gift or special treat? We smell a great marketing opportunity here; one that doesn’t have to be limited to Christmas! Use the advent calendar idea and apply it to any holiday, enticing fans to come back and click on your page every single day. Here are some creative ways to use the calendar to maximize engagement:

provide a new tip or trick each day

give fans the chance to win a special prize on random days

reveal a great coupon each day

publish clues for a contest or other competition

Wildfire’s Page Manager - one of the tools in our complete social media marketing suite - offers several customizable, “advent-like” templates like one we used to greet November with a bang. We launched this winter-themed calendar with 31 days of social media advice.

2. Ask simple questions related to the holidays, but also related to your brand or its personality.

Spark a chat with your audience by asking simple, relatable questions that tie back to your brand and the holidays. In the examples below, Kraft Foods and Geico roused fan response by asking about activities already on fans’ minds.

3. If you’re running holiday-themed promotions, keep reminding fans to enter.

Holiday-themed promotions are a fantastic way to give your fans to an exciting and engaging treat, yet we sometimes see brands launch promotions to much fanfare and then...crickets.

Silence.

Instead, reach out and nudge your audience to enter, and get them to take action by reminding them when the sweepstakes will end. Reminders also give users additional opportunities to re-post and share with friends.

4. The holidays are full of nostalgia: engage your fans with messages that encourage them to reminisce and share their stories on your page. They’ll connect the warm emotions they feel with your brand as well.

Every holiday has its own associated traditions. Take advantage of this commonality between the brand and the audience by asking your fans to reflect on their associated memories. Bonus branding points go to companies that tie in the memory prompt with the brand personality, as Nestle Toll House does below.

5. Highlight any limited-time or seasonal products or services you offer.

The holidays provide a great reason to run a seasonal promotion. Most brands release seasonal items or plan limited production runs around specific dates — use your Facebook messages to highlight these limited-time items, as Keurig does with a message about the three seasonal coffee flavors being released for the fall.

6. Help your fans out.

People love to feel like insiders, getting access to exclusive tips or strategic advice. The holidays are a great time to offer season-specific advice, especially if your brand strives to be a thought leader in its industry. Consider the example from HP below. They’ve isolated a customer group (those that take photos and might be interested in HP camera or picture editing technology) and written a helpful, holiday-themed article.

7. Surprise your fans with a special treat.

Break out of a ho-hum messaging routine by occasionally offering a surprise treat on your wall, like Vevo did by putting together a Halloween-themed playlist and sharing it with fans.

8. Reveal the people behind the brand, and how they celebrate the holidays.

One of the most successful ways to encourage and grow engagement is to humanize your brand. How? Reveal the people behind the brand, allowing users a glimpse at the folks who make your company great. In the example below, Levi’s tied in the Halloween holiday with a peek at employees in their costumes.

9. Provide holiday-themed uses for your brand’s products.

No matter what product (or service) you sell, if you can spin a holiday twist to its use, share the twist in a message! Though apple sauce can be used to make brownies any time of year, the Musselman’s page administrator takes advantage of Halloween as a chance to highlight one way to use its product.

10. Have fun with your audience!

You may be a serious marketer, but that doesn’t mean you have to take your brand so seriously. Any holiday is a chance to spread joy, fun, and be full of cheer! Show how your brand cares for users and fans by sharing digital holiday card or a Facebook photo. Better yet, get funny and creative like Silk did, in the example below. Can you spot the clever Photoshop job in the picture? 444 fans got a kick out of it!

Want even more strategic advice about how to conquer your social media marketing this holiday season? Sign up for our November 15 webinar recording, “Perfecting your Holiday Social Media Strategy!”

What You Should Know about Google+ Pages for Brands

Did you see Google’s announcement yesterday about opening up Google+ Pages for businesses and brands? If you’ve been waiting and watching Google+ from the wings, you’ve now been given a place to stage your brand entrance. Learn our ideas about the possibilities for brands on the 40-million-user Google+ social network, and how you can get involved with Google+ Pages in this post.

(Note: Tom, one of our fantastic product managers, channeled these predictions after a very close assessment of Google+ coupled with his attention to trends in social media marketing. They don’t represent the perspective or plans of the Google+ team.)

1. Move your brand up the search engine listings, and spend less on ads by increasing Google+ user engagement.

Google has already begun to incorporate a company’s social engagement levels into its search rankings. Now that users can +1 your brand (the equivalent of a “like” on Facebook), your +1 count could figure into the popularity and relevance rating of your brand in search results. Google could adjust search results based on even more types of social engagement the future.

Creating an engaging brand experience on your Google+ Page will help improve your search rankings and your paid Google ad performance on Google.com, as well as across Google's ad networks. Your social presence matters now more than ever in both consumer engagement and your marketing bottom line.

2. Pull in a potentially huge mobile audience.

Google+ comes standard on most Android phones and will immediately provide brands with access to a massive mobile audience. Imagine consumers seeing a message in their “Nearby” stream from a brand they assigned to one of their Circles. The message announces a flash sale on ladies winter boots over the next 3 hours, and includes driving directions to the store via Google Maps. Coupled with the astronomically rising popularity of the Android mobile platform, we’re seeing a serious opportunity for you to engage your audience on the run.

3. Target messaging to audience segments more easily than on other social networks.

Now businesses can use Circles to segment their social media audience in order to target content and maximize engagement. For example, you might have circles of users who took a brand survey, so you would add them to an “Engaged Responders” Circle. Another circle may include those who seem “Slow to Warm up.” Or maybe everyone would start in the “Slow to Warm up” Circle only to be moved to a more niche circle as they engage with your brand.

Brands could even host live video chats with a “Focus Group” Circle of power users (via Hangouts) to get feedback on new products, and generate “the love” with early adopters.

4. Tap into the massive audience using Google’s other apps.

Google+ will also help you reach and engage with the vast, existing audience of Google consumer app users (Gmail, Maps, Chrome, YouTube etc). First, you’ll see opportunities to bring your branded content to users inside of Google+ and enable them to easily share it with friends. Take YouTube, for example. Google has now added a YouTube search tab along the top right edge of each Google+ screen. When users search for a video, they now see a pop-up video player and playlist of related videos, and each one can be +1’ed and shared with the user’s Circles.

In the future, we can imagine Google enabling users to create user generated content (UGC) from a YouTube experience inside of Google+ as part of a brand-sponsored promotion.

Google has already implemented additional integrations with Chrome and Google Reader, and with each integration comes the opportunity for brands to hook audiences and draw them back to social experiences on Google+ Pages.

5. Collaborate with your internal and external customers.

We see the potential for Google+ to be an excellent internal company information sharing and collaboration too.

Google already has experience delivering products with the security and reliability necessary for enterprise solutions, as it offers with the popular Google Apps platform (used to create shared work documents, spreadsheets and presentations). Now that employees can create Google+ accounts with their corporate email addresses, it’s not hard to imagine companies using Google+ as an internal social network for workplace collaboration.

Using Circles, companies could allow secure sharing of selective information with customers inside and outside of an organization to easily enable focus groups and crowdsourcing. With these potential uses, Google+ could even provide services similar to Jive or Salesforce.com's Chatter, which also offer social collaboration tools.

So What’s Your Game Plan for Google+?

With the launch of Pages, Google+ has finally opened its doors to brands looking to build an audience on the network—a network that is, like it or not, intimately tied to Google search and massively popular consumer applications like YouTube and Chrome. Now is the time to get your Google+ game on, so you can rise above competitors at the onset and attract a valuable audience. Here are some ways we suggest you do it:

Drive as many +1’s as possible

Devise criteria for how you would segment your users into Circles and how you would customize content for each Circle

Continue to build up your audience on other social networks using Wildfire’s Social Marketing Suite, in order to seed your Google+ presence

Plan for cross-promotion from your Facebook page, Twitter account, and website to help bootstrap your Google+ presence

Brainstorm now how you could leverage Google+’s interactive new features such as Hangouts to more deeply engage your users

What makes you most excited about using Google+ for your brand? Share your insights in the comments, we love hearing from you!

Measuring Social Media Success, Post by Post

We recognize that smart marketers and brands need to measure the results of their social media efforts; in fact, the pressure on brand marketers to prove the return on their social marketing spend is quickly increasing. We are continually innovating our analytics offerings, so check out our previous post on our Facebook Insights integration, and stay tuned for many exciting announcements over the coming weeks.

Today, we’re happy to announce a new collection of analytics in the Wildfire Social Media Marketing Suite: post metrics.This new report incorporates and enhances the metrics available through Facebook’s Insights, providing in-depth analysis of each post, powerful comparisons and aggregate views of post engagement across all your pages, allowing you to quickly refine and optimize your messaging.
Let’s look at how these tools can benefit you.
We track and score every post based on several engagement metrics including Organic Reach, Viral Reach, People Talking About This, Visibility, and Viral Growth Rate. The latter two metrics were formulated by Wildfire to provide marketers with actionable criteria for judging the success of a given post (and also for posts over any time period).

Visibility represents the proportion of your fan base that saw one or more impressions of your post (typically in their news feed). It’s a measure of how well you’re able to reach your audience organically and it can change over time, as more engaging content leads to better exposure. The interplay between engaging content and how broadly your posts are seen is driven by Facebook’s ranking system, and while the algorithms are closely guarded secrets, Visibility is a tangible way to measure and track the effects of your posting strategy over time.

Viral Growth Rate represents how effectively you’re able to move your message from your initial (organic) audience to a wider population via viral sharing. The more engaging your content, the more likely people will be to Like it or Comment on it, thus telling stories about it and spreading the word about your brand. A higher viral growth rate implies stronger viral activity and a broader audience reached in relation to your initial organic exposure.

Above and beyond Facebook’s own interface, our analytics tools allow you to see - in a single view - engagement by post across all of your pages, drill down for further detail on individual page performance, and zoom in to a particular time period to discover what specific factors impacted your social presence.

We’re excited to provide these tools, allowing you to optimize your social media efforts and make ROI-based decisions in ways never before possible.

Now that you’ve read what post metrics can show you about your messaging, how will you use these analytics to measure your success? Tell us below in the comments.

Hot Holiday Facebook Marketing Opportunity: Introducing the AdventCalendar!*

*that's not just for advent!

At Wildfire, we’ve been hard at work designing beautiful and functional Facebook page template designs so that our clients have the richest, most compelling and interactive choice of pages to build their marketing campaigns on top of. We look forward to showcasing our design library for you soon, but there is one new template we just couldn’t wait to debut! The advent calendar template allows page administrators the opportunity to create a calendar with any number of days up to 31, while programming each day to unlock a special treat, message, gift, or prize.

Wildfire’s Page Manager, one of the tools in the complete social marketing suite, has several “advent-like” templates that are ready for customization, such as the one in the example below. To start November off with a bang, and encourage Wildfire fans to return to the fan page daily, we launched a winter-themed social media advent calendar on our own fan page that offers 31 days of social media advice, all through the month of November.

When a user clicks on a day to reveal its secret contents, he or she will see one of two things: if the day has been unlocked, the user will see a box appear with the revealed content; if the day has not been unlocked, the user will see a box with a reminder to come back again later when the content is unlocked. Check out the tips revealed on our own calendar on November 1:

The advent calendar comes in several colors and themes, and can be easily customized to whatever theme best fits your brand using the easy-to-update Page Manager customization guidelines. Here is another example of a holiday-themed advent calendar that can be customized with branded content:

How creative can you get with your fully customizable social media advent calendar? The sky is the limit! Tell us what you would put behind each day in the comments below— we love to hear from you!

Facebook Launched Its Mobile Platform

On October 10, Facebook rolled out its long awaited native iOS application and an HTML 5 web application. Part of Facebook’s first efforts in extending its full Platform to the mobile market, both apps not only provide a slick new user experience, but also bring social app discovery to mobile. Users can now discover and interact with apps on their mobile devices through three new channels: bookmarks, requests and newsfeed links. In addition to the three social channels, Facebook has also introduced Authenticated Referrals, which take users from the Facebook application to a native or web app without having to reauthenticate with their Facebook credentials.

Taken together, the new apps (currently available for third-party native apps on iOS devices and via m.facebook.com, and coming soon to Android) significantly reduce the need to manually authenticate with Facebook connect and make it easier for friends to interact with and discover apps.

Here’s a rundown of each of these new features:

Bookmarks

When a user interacts with an app on any computer or device, a short-link to the app is automatically added to the user’s Facebook Mobile sidebar.

If the user launches the app from this sidebar menu, she will automatically be taken to either the native iOS application or the web application.

Requests

An invitation to check out an app from a friend using a desktop browser can be received and acted on all within the mobile device.

Users who open the invitation to interact with an app will be taken straight to the mobile version of the app--either a native iOS or a mobile web app.

Newsfeed Links

Links in newsfeed posts can now also take users automatically to the mobile version of an app.

Authenticated Referrals

Users who navigate to your app and are already logged in to Facebook do not need to re-authenticate.

First time users of your app and those who have not previously used the mobile version of your app will be prompted to log in with their Facebook credentials and allow the app.

What are your thoughts on the introduction of social channels and authentication referrals to the mobile Facebook environment? What are you most excited about? Share your comments with us below, we love to hear from you!

Wildfire and LinkedIn Bring Social Media Marketing to B2B World

Initial results show 60% reduction in cost per lead when combining Wildfire with LinkedIn ads

We’re excited to announce that we’ve partnered with LinkedIn to bring our Social Media Marketing Suite to the LinkedIn platform! With Wildfire, companies on LinkedIn can create and manage social promotions to generate leads and grow their followers. Coming soon, they will also be able to publish messages to continually engage their audience and measure indepth analytics about the performance of their LinkedIn company page. We have gained extensive experience building a comprehensive social marketing product on Facebook and Twitter, and are now excited to bring these tools to the LinkedIn platform.

For all marketers, but especially B2B marketers, this is exciting news! Our initial tests show that running a Wildfire promotion in connection with a LinkedIn advertising campaign can double ad click-through rates and decrease cost per lead by more than 60%. Additionally, our tests have shown that the viral sharing rate for LinkedIn users can be up to several times higher than on other leading social networks.

With its over 120 million worldwide users, LinkedIn serves as a powerful venue for companies seeking to interact with customers and prospects, build positive brand awareness, and drive revenue. Consider the latest statistics:

Approximately two professionals sign up to join LinkedIn every second

Executives from all Fortune 500 companies are LinkedIn members

More than 2 million companies have LinkedIn Company Pages.

As Adweek recently noted, “Attracting followers now, while the feature is still relatively new, will cost much less than courting them down the road, when brands might have to lure them away from rival companies they’ve already decided to follow.”

We will be hosting a FREE LinkedIn Marketing Webinar to chat about what our partnership means for marketers and how B2B companies can best use LinkedIn for social media marketing.

Webinar: Register Now!

Now is the time to for you to incorporate LinkedIn into your social marketing strategy, and Wildfire is uniquely positioned to help you do so. To get started, here are three tips to help your company get the most out of LinkedIn:

Tip #1: Build Your Presence

A fast and easy way to build a large, active follower base is to create incentives through promotions. Create brand awareness, solicit product reviews and encourage attendance at professional conferences by running sweepstakes, contests, and discount campaigns that entice users.

Wildfire allows you to get up and running quickly with a turnkey marketing platform. When your promotion is ready, simultaneously publish it across multiple channels, now including LinkedIn, to reach your audience wherever they engage. Your branded promotion turns your LinkedIn page into a communication hub for followers.

Tip #2: Tap into Viral Sharing

Wildfire promotions seamlessly integrate with LinkedIn’s platform and allow you to tap into the network’s viral power. Users can share your company’s promotion with their LinkedIn networks, newsfeed, groups and specific users. Beyond promotions, use LinkedIn’s inherent sharing functions to spread news about your brand, upcoming product launches, to crowdsource new feature ideas, and more.

Tip #3: Follow & Learn From Your Results

Most successful promotions are supported by marketing efforts within and outside of social networks; track the most effective referral sources--advertisements, newsletters, your company page, etc.--for your campaign with Wildfire Analytics.

Our tests show that running a Wildfire powered promotion in connection with a LinkedIn advertising campaign significantly improves click-through rates and reduces cost per lead. With promotions and analytics, you can easily determine how to get the most out of your advertising dollars! Finally, the LinkedIn profiles gathered from promotion entrants provide high quality lead generation and insights. Use these metrics to find new clients, new employees and to build an engaged base of followers.

What is your company’s LinkedIn marketing strategy? We’d love to hear from you in the comments below! Also, please don’t forget to sign-up for our FREE LinkedIn Marketing Webinar.

Webinar: Register Now!

Wildfire Launches New Way to Measure Brand Engagement on Facebook.

Wildfire Integrates with Facebook’s new Insights Data to provide Brands with a richer understanding of Engagement.

We're very excited to announce big news for social media marketers and especially those of you (this should be all of you!) who are interested in better measuring and understanding your social media reach. Several weeks ago, Facebook selected Wildfire to help advise them on the development of some new metrics for Facebook Pages. These metrics are being launched today by Facebook and we've integrated them into our analytics dashboard to not only provide our clients with an easy way to digest and track the new Insights metrics, but to go deeper by providing additional insights, including the ability to aggregate the new analytics across multiple Facebook pages and tabs. This blog post will explain in simple terms what these new Facebook metrics mean for you and how Wildfire is enhancing them for our clients.

Some of the most notable new data points Facebook launched today include Friends of Fans, Reach, Engaged Users, and People Talking About This. Before delving into the details of the metrics themselves, it’s worth taking a moment to consider how these new Insights impact you as a social media marketer.

To understand the true value of your communications, you need to know how many users have been exposed to your messaging, and what proportion of your audience is actively responding to that messaging through the means available to the end consumer. In other words, how many people are viewing, Liking, sharing, commenting on, consuming or otherwise engaging with your content? A thorough understanding of how visible your messaging is and the extent of viral activity around it is crucial to optimizing your brand’s impact on Facebook.

Webinar: Register Now!

What do these new metrics do?

Think of it as a funnel: when you broadcast a message on Facebook, a portion of your fan base will see that post in their news feed. Of those users who are initially exposed—let’s call them your Organic Reach—a subset of them will respond positively by consuming content (e.g., watching a video, clicking on a link, etc.), Liking it, commenting on it, or taking other actions. These interactions constitute engagement of some kind. Facebook now counts the unique users who interact in one or more of these ways and labels them Engaged Users.

Some Engaged Users are special in that they take actions that cause others to see your brand name and content as well! For example, if one of your fans (let’s call her Mary) comments on your post, her friends will see it in their news feed, too. By commenting on your post, Mary is Talking About you to a broader audience. We refer to the size of this broad audience as your Viral Reach, i.e., the number of people you reached because of people Talking About your brand. By “talking about” your brand, Mary is counted both as an Engaged User and in the more specific People Talking About This metric.

Seeing that some of your fans are Talking About your brand leads to the notion that you could potentially reach many or all of their friends virally. To address this, Facebook also introduced a new metric called Friends of Fans, which is exactly that: the number of unique users who are friends of your Page’s fans, any of whom you could potentially reach with engaging content. For most Pages, Friends of Fans represent a significant multiplier over their direct fan base. Ultimately, the more captivating your message, the more likely you are to reach a larger proportion of the friends of your fans.

Analytics Cheat Sheet: Download Now!

Wildfire Analytics Give You All This, and More!

Wildfire was selected by Facebook to help advise them on their new Insights and we are therefore in a unique position to enable our clients to benefit from these new metrics on day one of the new Insights launch. In addition to providing our clients with an easy way to digest and track the new Insights metrics, Wildfire has gone beyond Facebook's new metrics to provide additional insight, including the ability to aggregate the Insights across all of your Facebook pages and all tabs published through our Social Marketing Suite.

So, for example, if you manage multiple Facebook Pages Wildfire will enable you to see at a glance your aggregate performance across all these pages, and to then drill down deeper to see the analytics for your individual pages. Even if you only manage one Facebook page but you have multiple tabs associated with this page our aggregation of the Insights data is helpful to you because you can see at a glance how you're performing, in aggregate, across all your tabs. These metrics allow you to evaluate engagement comprehensively across your social properties, compare your properties side-by-side, and drill down for further details. In this way you can readily identify which of your properties and tabs are generating the greatest engagement and you can learn from them in order to optimize your lower performing pages and tabs.

Our new analytics offerings help you understand your Page’s reach and the size of the audience responding to your message, so you can unlock the potential of your social media presence. With our tools, you’ll be able to optimize your broadcasts to reach a wider audience, engage a broader community, and effectively spread the word about your brand, product, or service.

We will be hosting a free Facebook Insights webinar on October 18. Register now and tune in to learn all you need to know about these new analytics.

Analytics Webinar: Register Now!

We’re excited about Facebook’s new analytics and our own. What do you think? We’d love to hear from you in the comments below!

Facebook Revealed Massive Changes Last Week, But What Do They Mean?

Last week, Facebook revealed some of its biggest changes yet. You’ve probably heard the terms Timeline, Ticker and Open Graph floating around, so let’s take a look at what these terms mean, and what implications they have for brands’ and agencies’ social media marketing.

Timeline
Very soon (if you haven’t hacked it already), your profile will be completely overhauled into a sleek new page with large cover pictures, featured actions, certain aggregated information and more. At its core, this Timeline is a chronology of a user’s life on Facebook, with items automatically appearing based on an algorithm intended to capture a user’s most important life events. A few things to keep in mind:

Some things are grouped together, such as all things a user Liked in a given month.

The more engaging an action, the more prominently it will appear and remain in the Timeline.

Users can edit to manually add, remove, feature or de-emphasize Timeline events. In his keynote address at f8, Mark Zuckerberg enthusiastically demonstrated how a user can go back to the year of his birth and upload a baby picture.

Although historically, major profile changes have often followed similar brand page changes, there is no official word yet on whether brand pages will also be redesigned.

Open Graph and Custom Actions
Last year, Facebook rolled out Open Graph, allowing brands to connect to a user’s Facebook social graph. This year, it rolled out significant changes, allowing app developers to create custom actions using any verb and object related to the activity taking place on the app. These so-called “lightweight” activities can be defined by the app creator and pushed throughout the Facebook experience. Here are the highlights:

The Open Graph integrates with the Newsfeed, Ticker (described below) and Timeline, making the app a key part of users’ and their friends’ Facebook experiences.

As users engage, the custom action appears on Facebook. Ex: Jane cooked a recipe from Best Recipes App.

Changes to the structure of permissions allow a user to give permission one time for an app to post about that user’s activity on the app thereafter.

Custom actions improve Sponsored Stories in that they can now include more interesting information about an action a user has taken, and similarly improve ad targeting in that brands can direct ads to users who have taken certain kinds of actions. See our previous blog post for more information on how Sponsored Stories work.

Newsfeed and Ticker
Closely related to the Open Graph changes are the Newsfeed redesign and introduction of the Ticker. According to Facebook, ensure that the overall concept behind these changes is to make sure users don’t miss important events, regardless of how often they log in.

The flow of information to users has been revamped to feature higher quality engagement in a single Newsfeed, a real-time feed of all activity in the Ticker, and improved photo album display.

The Newsfeed now appears as one continuous feed, with “Top Stories” usually appearing first and the remaining “Recent Stories” appearing below. This adjusts based on how often a user checks Facebook.

Likes and more minor actions are removed from the Newsfeed but still appear in the Ticker.

What’s a marketer to do?
Now that we know what changes Facebook has made, brands and marketers need to figure out what they mean for social media marketing. Based on our extensive experience running over 150,000 social media campaigns, here’s our take:

“Likes” are still very important. This is the way brands build their audiences, to whom they can communicate directly, and promotions are the best way to build a fanbase. Sweepstakes and instant win campaigns are best for generating “Likes,” while contests, trivia, group deals and engaging pages are best for fostering engagement.

Newsfeed vs. Brand Pages. There had been recent talk of apps/tabs/pages decreasing in significance. The f8 changes turn that around, in that deeper, more engaging actions are the ones that will appear in Top Stories and Timelines and are therefore more persistent within the social graph. Prior to f8, to the extent that they appeared in a newsfeed or profile wall, more minor actions had the same real estate as more engaging actions, whereas they are now moved to the fast-moving Ticker.

Reevaluate your brand’s strategy. Many brands will be able to capitalize on the increased engagement necessary to produce frequent appearances in the Ticker and lasting impressions in the Newsfeed and Timeline, but that won’t work for everyone. If your brand is one where engaging actions aren’t obvious, think about what activities your fans regularly take, and what partnerships or co-marketing could help turn those activities into engaging custom actions on Facebook.

In light of Facebook’s recent changes, Wildfire will enhance our existing Facebook application offerings to take advantage of the new opportunities. Over the coming months, we will work to integrate Open Graph actions into our applications so they will start sending lightweight feeds to Facebook’s new Ticker, and adapt existing applications and develop new ones that will encourage consumers to place apps on their timeline on a regular basis.

What Facebook changes are you most looking forward to exploring? Share your thoughts in the comments, we love to hear from you!

Facebook will Turn Off all FBML on June 01, 2012. Transition to iFramesNow!

Last year, Facebook announced its plan to deprecate FBML as a Facebook page administration platform over time. This March, it followed up this statement with the announcement of a full transition to iFrames, phasing out FBML. Since March, page admins have not been able to create any new FBML apps, but apps which were already in existence remained functional until the deprecation was scheduled to begin. Facebook announced at f8 the official deprecation date of all FBML endpoints: June 1, 2012. This is the date when any remaining FBML modules inside of Facebook will cease to function. As the time has come to fully transition to iFrames and depart from the FBML standard completely, this tutorial will explain how to transition your Facebook pages to iFrames from FBML.

Background: How FBML and iFrame Apps Work

FBML
FBML is Facebook's legacy framework for serving custom content on canvas pages as well as tab pages. This content is effectively proxied by Facebook, which is to say that the user's browser never hits the app developer's server directly. Instead, Facebook requests the content from the app developer's server, parses and filters it, and returns it to the browser.

As part of this filter process, Facebook evaluates FBML tags that are used to personalize the content. The functionality of FBML tags ranges from simple tasks like displaying the user's name (fb:name) to rendering feeds or comment boxes, customizing content based on the user's age or country, whether they've liked the page, etc.

Static FBML App
The Static FBML app was an application provided by Facebook that enabled the easy creation of FBML based Facebook page tabs. To use the application, page admins simply added the app to their page, and then customize the content. Along with FBML, the Static FBML app will be deprecated on June 1, 2012.

iFrame Apps
iFrame Apps are Facebook’s accepted framework for serving content on canvas pages as well as tabs. Content is served directly by the application developer’s server, rather than being proxied by Facebook’s servers. Because the page is hosted externally of Facebook, it can render HTML, CSS and even Javascript just like any external web page does, which was not the same with FBML. This is a big improvement as developers now have more possibilities for building customized apps in a way which is more familiar than learning new systems (a prior necessity with FBML and FBJS.) iFrames are often used in conjunction with the Facebook Javascript SDK (http://developers.facebook.com/docs/reference/javascript/).

Wildfire iFrame App for Facebook Pages
Wildfire’s iFrames App for Pages is an app that allows Facebook brand page admins to easily create iFrame based Facebook page tabs. Content can be customized to display differently for fans and non-fans of the page. As a disclaimer, while there are similar third party apps in existence by other developers, the Wildfire iFrames App for Pages is among most popular free landing page tools, with over 7.6 million monthly active users.

Making the Transition

To understand how to transition existing FBML applications into iFrame apps, we need to look at ways page administrators have been using FBML to date, and suggest options for an easy transition:

Example scenarios of existing FBML use:

SCENARIO #1 - Static FBML app with static HTML content:

To transition to iFrames, either build your own iFrame app, or use one of several third party apps that can be used to host your static content, such as Wildfire’s iFrames App for Pages.

SCENARIO #2 - Static FBML app with minimal FBML use for personalization purposes (Examples include using the fb:name tag to render the name of the user.):

In extremely simple cases like this, you may be able to get away with using the Facebook Javascript SDK to retrieve the necessary data using the Graph API and write it to the DOM. See http://developers.facebook.com/docs/guides/web/ (“Personalization” section). Note that this will require authenticating the user first and prompting for basic permissions (http://developers.facebook.com/docs/authentication/), most simply using the FB JS SDK.

SCENARIO #3 - Static FBML app with conditional rendering based on the user’s demographics (age / country) or whether they “Like” the page:

This could be transitioned using a similar client side JS SDK approach, but the downside is that both content variations would have to be included in the HTML source, so savvy users would be able to see the restricted content by viewing the source.

A better approach is to handle this server side. The signed_request parameter includes demographic information as well as a flag that indicates whether the user “Likes” the current page, which can be used to select the appropriate content. More information about these parameters can be found within Facebook documentation here.

SCENARIO #4 - Static FBML app with complex FBML content:

A transition will likely require implementing a custom iFrame app, or using one of the sophisticated third party page management applications, such as Wildfire’s Page Manager.

SCENARIO #5 - Custom FBML app:

Implement a custom iFrame app.

Special note: Some FBML tags can be replaced with Facebook Social Plugins (http://developers.facebook.com/docs/plugins/), such as the Comments box.

Next Steps and Important Tips for your Custom iFrames App

Choosing to use a page management product like Wildfire’s Page Manager means you can skip all of the technically detailed setup process outlined throughout this post.

To deploy an iFrame app of your own, you will need to set up your own server. Developers can pick any web development stack they’re comfortable with (such as PHP, Ruby on Rails, Django, J2EE, or others), and are responsible for picking a hosting environment. Heroku provides a great solution for Facebook apps.

When writing your HTML, remember that the main character <div> is 520 pixels wide for optimal Facebook viewing on Facebook page tabs and full width for Facebook canvas.

To launch an iFrames app, you must first create the Facebook page as an app within Facebook. The setup of this app involves tying it to the external web address of the pages you're iFraming. This app will be run in both secure and non-secure browsing environments, and you will be able to set it up for equal accessibility within these developer settings as well.

After registering as a developer at http://developers.facebook.com, click to “Create new app.” When adjusting “Settings; Basic,” you will need to provide both Regular and Secure URLs. Note that starting October 1, 2011 all Facebook apps will need to support https, so you will need to obtain an SSL certificate and configure your server and application appropriately. With this setup, you’ll quickly be ready to add your newly created app to a fan page!

Now is the Time

Remember, now is the time to carefully comb the applications you’ve installed to your Facebook brand page over time to make sure none of them were built incorporating FBML modules or endpoints. On June 1, 2012 Facebook will flip the switch on FBML, and any applications or pages still employing the page management framework will go dark. The good news is, iFrames is an excellent alternative framework, allowing for greater developer flexibility and more creative programming options! For those that would prefer ready-made, easy to use, and FREE tools that require no technical skill to install, Wildfire’s got you covered.

Wildfire launches first brand marketing app for Facebook pages thatties in with Sponsored Stories

Shortly after we launched the Wildfire Social Marketing Suite, our friends at Facebook asked us to create the first ever app designed to work with Facebook’s Sponsored Stories. There’s been a lot of discussion among social media marketers about the power of Sponsored Stories to enhance a brand’s reach on Facebook through ads and the newsfeed, and Wildfire created the Storyteller app (or as we call it, plug-in) to make Sponsored Stories even more effective because it encourages the creation of authentic user generated feedback about brands (e.g. “I love my Audi because it has the most beautiful design of any car in the world”) as opposed to the more formulaic stories (e.g. “Jane Doe liked the Audi Page”) that are typically generated by Sponsored Stories ads. We’ve already worked with several major brands to run campaigns powered by our Storyteller app, including a major auto company, an entertainment company and a professional sports franchise and the results have been impressive. In this post, we’ll explain what Facebook Sponsored Stories are, how the Wildfire Storyteller app works in conjunction with Sponsored Stories, and we’ll share the success we had when we tested our Storyteller app on our own Facebook page.

In case you’re not aware, Sponsored Stories are a Facebook advertising format—Facebook defines them as stories that are “eligible to appear in your News Feed.” Sponsored Stories show up, like traditional ads, on the right column of pages on Facebook. Companies can choose different user actions — such as posts, likes, check-ins or actions within Facebook apps — and feature them in their ad campaign. Facebook says that unlike traditional ads, “Sponsored Stories help to drive authentic and scalable word of mouth,” because the ads stem from real user interactions and are shown to all of that user’s friends. Here are some examples of Sponsored Stories you’ve probably already seen in your Facebook account:

“App Share” Stories are created when a user starts using a Facebook app

Page Post Like” Stories are created when a user “Likes” one of the posts made by your page

The current Sponsored Stories formats produce content that follows a template – for example “Jane Doe likes the Wildfire Page” or “Jane Doe used Farmville”, so although the content is personalized it does not allow for the generation of highly unique and personalized content. Given this, Facebook and Wildfire thought it would be powerful to create an app that inherently encourages users to create unique, personalized content that can then be turned into newsfeed stories and ads. The Wildfire Storyteller app, available exclusively to Wildfire Social Suite customers, enables brands to ask their users for feedback and opinions and the responses get posted as a newsfeed story to their wall, to their friends’ newsfeeds and in Sponsored Stories targeted toward their friends.

Using the Wildfire Storyteller app, you can create a tab in your Facebook Page to ask your users fun and engaging questions about your brand. You can then set up an entire customized Facebook Feed Story that gets published alongside that user’s generated response. This feed story is especially powerful in that you can included a branded video or image with the story and you can also customize the feed story title, URL and description. So, for example, a movie brand could use our Storyteller app to ask fans “What was your favorite scene from the Hangover II movie trailer?” and the ad generated from a user’s response could include the movie trailer, a link to buy tickets for the movie, and a description of the movie.

We tried it with one of our own Facebook Fan Pages, to measure just how effective the Wildfire Storyteller app could be in generating word of mouth. Behind the scenes, this is how easy setup of the Storyteller app is — you can configure it right from your Wildfire Social Suite Page Manager!

And this is what it looks like in action!

As long as you’ve created a Sponsored Stories ad campaign, all of these newsfeed posts create ads targeted to your users’ friends. We wanted to test for ourselves the difference made by using the Wildfire Storyteller app with Facebook Sponsored Stories ads against traditional Facebook ads. We tested the entry rate from traditional ads against that of our Sponsored Stories ad and newsfeed posts using our Storyteller app. We found that the Storyteller app generated content was over 4x more effective than traditional ads in getting people to convert!

Traditional Facebook Ad: 3.3% conversion rate!

Facebook Sponsored Story with Storyteller app: 17% conversion rate!

To control for negative or offensive content our Storyteller app enables a brand to apply word filters so they can control which kind of content gets distributed as Sponsored Stories and newsfeeds. Consumers who write stories that include these filtered words will still be able to submit their story but the story will not be distributed as a newsfeed or a Sponsored Story. Interestingly, however, of the campaigns that we have already run using our Storyteller app, the overwhelming majority of comments were highly positive.

One interesting thing we observed while testing and learning about Sponsored Stories is that they might be best suited for brands with larger fan bases. Because an ad only gets displayed to friends of your fans, brands with much bigger fan bases will likely see more significant results than smaller brands simply because smaller brands most likely can’t reach enough users to make it worthwhile. If you’re a larger brand, Sponsored Stories in conjunction with the Storyteller app can be an exciting new tool in your arsenal to generate authentic and scalable word of mouth in the form of user generated recommendations.

We’re excited to be the first Facebook developer to ignite the potential of Sponsored Stories ads! To find out more about how you can use Wildfire Social Marketing Suite, including Page Manager and the new Storyteller app, check out the details here.

SXSW Panel 2012: Help Wildfire Land a Solo Panel and Expose the Big Data Behind Social Media Use!

Help Wildfire secure a speaking presentation at the 2012 SXSW festival in Austin, Texas, by voting for CEO Victoria Ransom's panel application:

In 2012 more and more companies will move beyond the “trial and error” stage of social media to truly embrace it but still the question lingers – does social media benefit all companies? All industries? What makes some social media campaigns successful and others not? How can a company know if it is doing well in social? Wildfire, the only social media marketing startup to receive an investment from Facebook’s fbFund, has the answer to all these questions and more – and has real data to back it up. Using exclusive data collected from more than 100,000 campaigns run via Wildfire’s social marketing platform and billions of data points collected from Wildfire’s detailed tracking of more than 30 million Facebook pages and Twitter accounts, co-founder and CEO Victoria Ransom will unveil in-depth data, segmented by industry, company size, geography and more, on how customers engage with Facebook pages, company Twitter profiles and Facebook check-ins.

If this sounds like a panel you'd love to watch, help us make it happen by voting it into existence! SXSW chooses panels partially by popular vote (a whopping 30%!) so we can't make this happen without your help!

VOTE HERE: http://panelpicker.sxsw.com/ideas/view/13036 Thanks so much, in advance, for your help!

Mind the Statistics: Creating Engaging Fan Pages for your Brand onFacebook

In this post, we will cover the reason that maintaining an engaging Facebook Fan Page is important to growing your fan community; reasons that fans abandon brand pages; and ways that you can engage fans so that they remain interactive, using real examples of pages as case studies.

What is the value of an engaging fan page? Creating an engaged and interactive community on your brand’s Facebook Fan Page is about more than capturing a population of “likes” and leaving it at that. We know why you want to build a sizable fan base: 51% of Facebook users say they are more likely to buy from a brand that they like on Facebook, and 60% of users say they’re more likely to recommend a brand to their friends if they like it on Facebook (CMB 2011). The promising message of these statistics spur marketers to build fan communities, and try to do it fast. However, users can be fickle about maintaining this commitment to a brand, and will unfollow brands for many reasons, such as posting too frequently or with uninteresting content.

Because disinterested fans are nearly as good as non-fans, a static fan page is of little value to your brand without continued engagement. This blog post will introduce a number of goals you can set that are supported by industry statistics about user behavior. Each goal will be accompanied by methods of accomplishment as well as several examples of real-life case studies that exemplify these achievements. These goals, when set as part of a complete social media marketing strategy, help brands create and maintain “sexy” and engaging Brand Pages on Facebook.

Why does engagement fall over time?

What reasons do fans give for unfollowing brands? (source: ExactTarget 2011)

Now that you know the top causes of the fan “break-up,” avoid them! Don’t rely solely on an automated messaging stream to send out uninteresting posts at a predetermined rate. Create engagement on your page, giving visitors a reason to stick around and interact. Most interactions lead directly to an activity update being posted to the fan’s wall displaying their interaction with your brand, which can be seen by their friends.

How to increase engagement?

Now, lets consider the marketing goals you can set for your page, and how to achieve them:

Go beyond the newsfeed

To avoid having your fans unlike your brand because your page posts became “repetitive and boring”, create reasons for your fans to interact with your page, including applications that encourage participation and activity from users. For example, Wildfire Page Manager can be used to create pages with limitless plugin capabilities. Use these plugins to get beyond the wall, creating engaging interaction scenarios for your users on multiple tabs across your fan page. Let’s take a look at ideeli, whose fan page is demonstrating great success with this challenge:

ideeli frequently switches up their profile picture, effectively using the valuable bottom half to point out a new feature to engage with.

ideeli also seeks to attract new users with consistently running promotions. Recently they gave away “3 fabulous getaways”. Running promotions like this allows ideeli to draw in existing and new fans via advertising which promotes the giveaway.

ideeli plans for the future: what happens to a user after they’ve entered into a promotion, for example? Typically, the user wonders what they can do next, and looks around for interesting items on your page that might keep them there.

ideeli has created constantly rotating engaging plugins on the other tabs within the fan page, where users can spend time browsing and interacting.
In particular, notice the “Shoes” tab, where users are encouraged to voice their opinion about whether the flat shoes pictured are “Dainty or Glam?” In addition to voting, which yields an immediate poll count, they are encouraged to be more specific in a comments plugin right below the shoes box. The comments they leave can also be shared straight to their newsfeed, an example of a great way to create social sharing.

Also within the shoes tab, ideeli captures eyeballs on the same page by prompting users to become a member of the retail merchandise club, in a plug-in right below the comments.

If that weren’t enough, ideeli also includes an element of e-commerce in a creative but unobtrusive way, by including a small photo carousel that displays one image of a shoe available for sale at a time, including a button that links right to it. Users could browse through all the photos in the carousel, and always have the option to complete a sale, all while spending time on the ideeli Facebook fan page.

Finally, just on that page ideeli makes sure to capture the very last of the lingering eyes with an RSS plugin, drawing users in to various other content they’d enjoy with short descriptions and links to it, such as the post featuring Jessica Simpson.

Create social sharing.

18% of users become a fan of a brand on Facebook because they “want to show others that I like and support this brand.” (eMarketer). What can your brand do to drive this kind of social sharing?

Give your users something to share! What do users love to share? Interesting or funny content, jokes, comic strips, pictures, and video. Here is an example of an entire tab on Infiniti’s Facebook page dedicated to just videos: four newly produced commercials for their cars. Each one is included with its own Facebook “Share” button, which is programmed to send the video straight to the user’s newsfeed, where all his friends can see it too.

Create brand affinity.

8% of users become a fan of a brand on Facebook to be the first to know information about it, and 6% do so to gain access to exclusive content (eMarketer). Treating your users like insider VIPs, and creating an environment which expresses this relationship, can help to create brand affinity. Look at how Infiniti is using pages on its Facebook Fan Page to create brand affinity:

In advance of the reveal of the Infiniti JX Concept car in August, the Infiniti page has a timed photo carousel plugin installed to a page on its profile: this plugin reveals exclusive, never-before-seen photos of the concept car, only to the Facebook users of the page. To add fuel to the fire, Infiniti reminds users of the exclusivity of the content and stokes anticipation by including a countdown to the time the next picture becomes revealed on the fan page and is added to the carousel.

In addition to Infiniti, the fan page for EA Sports SSX video game has interesting exclusive content for its fans as well:

To engage with its gaming fans, EA Sports is releasing a series of character comic strips, one at a time, at different dates. This encourages users to come back and view them as they are released, but it also reinforces the user’s affinity with the brand, as each comic that is released is a piece of exclusive content that only visitors to the fan page can access.

How else can you foster interactions with your fans that go beyond the wall on your page? Show fans how else you’re being social, and where else they can interact with you.

Insert a plug-in to your tab that pulls in the Twitter feed for your brand, as Infiniti does in its Welcome page.

Note that on the same content page, Infiniti takes care to draw attention to where else users can “Stay Inspired” with buttons that showcase its other social identities on Flickr, Youtube, and Twitter.

Use the wall for nurturing fans over time.

Now that you’re armed with a set of goals and the strategies to achieve them, messaging your users continuously over time should remain top of mind. It’s important to keep in mind, however, that not all posts are created equally, nor are they treated that way by Facebook. So how can you optimize your messaging strategies to reach the most people, and remain engaging and interactive?

Stay tuned for the next post from Wildfire where we’ll analyze the efficacy of different types of Facebook posts, and outline a strategy for creating engaging posts for your page.

What did you think of the strategies outlined in this post about creating and maintaining engaging Facebook pages? Are you already implementing these strategies on your own Pages? Leave us a note in the comments; we’d love to hear from you!